The discussion primarily addresses the question of how and why to study discourse on musical matters and what its role is within any musical culture. It approaches the issue through an epistemological critique of the musicological research paradigm of reception history and highlights some of its fundamental shortcomings. It seeks to surpass these by developing an alternative and more general theoretical framework to study musical practices through discourse on them. The most appropriate initiation point for such an investigation is discerned to be the smallest independent semantic unit of a language – a word. Therefore, in the second part of this master's thesis, the discussion turns into an analytical case study of three relatively frequently used Slovenian words in the discourse on musical matters between 1990 and 2010: »sincerity«, »sincere« and »sincerely«. All instances of the usage of these words were found in printed sources and compiled into a textual corpus, the contents of which were used for various statistical analyses using computational tools. The results of these analyses are finally presented in the form of annotated graphical and tabular displays. Based on these preliminary findings and the material collected in general, it is possible to continue the outlined research work in several directions in the future, which is why the entire textual corpus is also annexed to the thesis.
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